A blog about things I run into doing my job as a Systems Administrator that I think others might find interesting or useful.

Searching returns no results even though you can see files in folder

This one was fairly obscure to find and the cause of the problem probably exists on desktops as well as servers. I recently had a customer who could search in all of their drives and folders on their server except their main share. From within this folder I would search for *.doc or *.docx files I could see right there in the folder and it would immediately return no results found like it was not even trying to search.

The cause? Someone had removed the SYSTEM account from this branch of folders. The SYSTEM account must have full permissions to files and folders in order to index them.

Once I added the SYSTEM account back on indexing took off and indexed about 60,000 more items and I was able to search for files and get results.

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About Me

I work as a Systems Administrator for a Mid sized Pacific NW company. In addition to keeping our servers running, tracking licensing, and planning our future needs I also do some minor programming in PowerShell, VBScript, C#, and whatever other language is needed at the time.